Korda Collection

The producer behind such celebrated films as The Four Feathers and The Third Man is one of the most colourful and important figures in the history of the British cinema. This gripping biography tells how with extraordinary ambition, enterprise and showmanship, Alexander Korda established in Britain a film industry that rivalled Hollywood, built Europe's biggest studio, and created world-class stars, including Charles Laughton and Vivien Leigh. The biography traces Korda's path from his rural childhood in a remote part of Hungary to a British knighthood. Korda's legacy, it argues, was a film industry that dared to dream on the largest possible scale. But he also exemplified the pattern of boom and bust that dogged the British cinema ever since he first came into the limelight in 1933 with the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII. To understand his often turbulent career is to gain a profound insight into the nature of the British cinema both then and now.

Alexander Korda's masterpiece "The Private Life of Henry VIII" was arguably the most important British film of the pre-war period and a phenomenal, critical and box-office success. Greg Walker's accessible and thoroughly researched book examines the film itself, its makers and its place in the cinematic and cultural history of the period. He examines Korda's subtle treatment of national and "international" identity, his representation of British history, use of modern stereotypes, and discusses the representation of gender and sexuality in the film, including that of Henry's wives and Laughton's award-winning central performance.

Alexander Korda, an outstanding figure of the British cinema, was among the first to embrace Technicolor and was responsible for such films as The Thief of Baghdad, The Four Feathers and Things to Come. This book is published in association with Central Television Enterprises, who have undertaken a major restoration of all his 31 films. It is illustrated with original production stills and includes a biography of the director, film synopses, production details and full cast lists. Contemporary reviews show how the films were received on their first release, and these are contrasted with a modern critique of each film.

This catalog, which accompanied an exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, gathers paintings, drawings and photography from Cuba done over the past century and a half. In addition to hundreds of works on paper, it features revealing photographs - some never before published - that record the country's wars of independence and revolution, its utopian endeavors and social realities. Numerous essays explore aspects of the Cuban visual arts such as nineteenth-century landscapes and photojournalism, the burgeoning of the arte nuevo period, Wifredo Lam's seminal African-inspired images, the creation of the famed collective mural, Castro-era poster art and the emergence of a new generation of artists.

In this original and widely researched book, Billie Melman explores the culture of history during the age of modernity. Her book is about the production of English pasts, the multiplicity of their representations and the myriad ways in which the English looked at history (sometimes in the most literal sense of 'looking') and made use of it in a social and material urban world, and in their imagination. Covering the period between the Napoleonic Wars and the Coronation of 1953, Melman recoups the work of antiquarians, historians, novelists and publishers, wax modellers, cartoonists and illustrators, painters, playwrights and actors, reformers and educationalists, film stars and their fans, musicians and composers, opera-fans, and radio listeners. Avoiding a separation between 'high' and 'low' culture, Melman analyses nineteenth-century plebeian culture and twentieth-century mass-culture and their venues - like Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors, panoramas, national monuments like the Tower of London, and films - as well as studying forms of 'minority' art - notably opera. She demonstrates how history was produced and how it circulated from texts, visual images, and sounds, to people and places and back to a variety of texts and images. While paying attention to individuals' making-do with culture, Melman considers constrictions of class, gender, the state, and the market-place on the consumption of history. Focusing on two privileged pasts, the Tudor monarchy and the French Revolution, the latter seen as an English event and as the framework for narrating and comprehending history, Melman shows that during the nineteenth century, the most popular, longest-enduring, and most highly commercialized images of the past represented it not as cosy and secure, but rather as dangerous, disorderly, and violent. The past was also imagined as an urban place, rather than as rural. In Melman's account, City not green Country, is the centre of a popular version of the past whose central Images are the dungeon, the gallows, and the guillotine.

From his hardscrabble NYC upbringing, through the NYPD ranks, to command of America’s first ever joint task force on terrorism alongside the FBI, Kevin M. Hallinan lived a lot of history. From beat cop to detective, Hallinan maneuvered through some of America’s most volatile decades and saw from the inside the tenuous gray line between law and order. The job proved to be extremely isolating. And it was almost always hair-trigger. Early in his career, Hallinan became embroiled in deadly mob cases, which pulled him under the scrutiny of the feared and historic Knapp Commission on police corruption. In extreme danger and under pressure, he persevered and kept his integrity intact. Higher-ups took notice and brought him into the chief of detectives’ office where he helped reorganize robbery squads and create innovative and responsive new police initiatives. One such effort helped bring awareness and sensitivity to sexual assault investigations and contributed to the creation of the revolutionary Special Victims Unit. And that was only the beginning. As the 80s unfolded and deadly attacks on police, diplomatic missions, and corporate targets escalated throughout the city, Hallinan relied on the mentoring of a growing network of law enforcement notables. It was compiling this amazing human network that made him the perfect choice to help pull together and lead the pioneering FBI/NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force. The JTTF, as it came to be known, would go on to create many of the counterterrorism tools and tactics that keep America safe to this very day. After retiring from law enforcement, Hallinan began a new chapter as Executive Director of Security and Facilities Management for Major League Baseball. His fascinating inside look at a life in law enforcement spans layers of history, explores evolutions in national security, and features game-changing heroes and eye-opening innovations. Kevin M. Hallinan’s life and learning are at once informative, thrilling, entertaining—and perhaps most of all, truly inspiring.

Many British films never make it to the screen. Obstacles of finance, censorship, distribution or creative breakdown can appear in their way, and they might even fail to get beyond the script stage. This book collects new essays by leading scholars that use archival resources to reconstruct the stories behind a range of films by prominent film-makers. These thwarted productions are all too often excluded from histories of British cinema, but the accounts of their unmaking contained in Sights Unseen provides an illuminating insight into the factors which have served to undermine the stability of the film industry in Britain.

The release of 'Things to Come' in 1936 was one of the key moments in the history of science fiction in the cinema. The film was the brainchild of H. G. Wells, whose worldwide reputation as a thinker had persuaded its producer, Alexander Korda, to offer him a contract giving him virtually total control over the project. Korda drafted a dazzling array of talents to render into pictures Wells's ideas of the future a hundred years hence. His brother, Vincent Korda, a distinguished painter, was employed as art director, and the Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy contributed ideas for futuristic sets. As director, Korda hired William Cameron Menzies, who had practically invented the profession of Hollywood art director through his work with Douglas Fairbanks on 'The Thief of Baghdad 'and Rudolf Valentino on 'Son of the Sheik,' and whose career would climax with 'Gone With the WInd.' The result was a landmark in cinematic design. Christopher Frayling shows, with a wealth of illustrations, how the boldness and brilliance of the sets and costumes mark out 'Things to Come 'as British cinema's greatest contribution to the science fiction genre, amply justifying his judgement that ''Things to Come 'is to modernism as 'Blade Runner' is to postmodernism.'

In this book McKibbin investigates the ways in which class culture characterised English society and intruded every aspect of life, during the period 1918-1951. He also shows the increasing effects of Americanisation on this culture.